Modern Beer consist of four major ingredients, although it is know that some of our major breweries add up to 60 different chemicals like a pro wrestler uses steroids. The Craft Brewer typically sticks to the basics, Water, Malt, Hops and Yeast. By understanding these four ingredients and the role they play in creating beer we can understanding the flavor profile of each different beer we encounter.

Water is the backbone of every beer you will encounter and is up to 90% of that beer. The water itself “H20” is a vehicle in which different dissolved salts and compounds are carried, this can be related to a term called “Hard” or “Soft”. Water itself can contain any different combination of salt, minerals, and compounds and it is the amount that determine the Hardness or Softness of water, the more, the harder and the less the softer. This is rated on a scale Parts per Million or Milligrams per Liter.

The amount and type of salt, minerals and compound can dramatically affect the outcome of any beer. Any good brewer worth his “salt” will know his water like the back of his hand. For each major style of beer there is a type of water in which certain salt and compound are prevalent. The picture is the pure form of a very popular brewer's salt gypsum.

Through filtration and other types of water treatment such as R.O., (short for reverse osmosis), the brewer can create base water in which the brewer may add the needed minerals, salts and so on for the type of water that is needed for their beer. These compounds effect how a beer will taste, more of one and less of another can affect hop flavor and aroma, like wise the salts effects how the yeast performs and again how much extract you will receive from your mashing and the malt.

Currently for my water treatment at the brewery I use Calcium Hydroxide to drop out carbonates and add in a percentage of Calcium Chloride to bring the Calcium content of the brewing water to 220 ppm which I find is perfect for all the beers that I produce.

Malt is short for Malted Barley. Most any cereal grain can be malted, if it germinates, it can be malted. The process is relatively simple and unchanged for thousands of years. The written history of beer goes back thousands years, but the true history of beer is lost in antiquity. Some have suggested that man may have stopped his nomadic lifestyle some 25,000 years ago because of fermented beverages.

The Egyptian “Maltsters” would take grain from the previous year, (most cereal grains have to go through a resting period during the fall and winter. This is built in survival for the grain to ensure that when it falls from the plant in the autumn and hits the earth it will not begin to grow until the following spring), and place it in large wicker baskets. From there the baskets would be lowered into wells for steeping. During this time the grain will absorb water and begin to “wake up”. This may take from 24 to 36 hours. After which the basket is raised above the well water level for germination. Germination is exothermic, but for malting properly, we must control the temperature to ensure the best results. The Egyptian Maltsters would control the temperature by raising or lowering the baskets within the well. Raising the basket closer to the surface will increase the temperature and speed up germination or lowering the baskets to drop the temperature thus decreasing the rate of germination. (During germination little rootlets will form and enzymes are released from the inner shell. These enzymes will to start break down the core which is comprised of complex carbohydrates or starches. These starches are the food for the germinating plant before it can begin to produce its own food.) After the rootlet where half or three-quarter the length of the kernel (4 to 7 days) they would remove the baskets from the well and spread the malt on the ground to be dried by the sun.

Modern Malting is done pretty much the same way. The only difference is mechanization and volumes. The Egyptians produced enough malt to make some where in the vicinity of 100,000 liters of beer annually while the modern malting company can produce thousands of tons of malt to produce millions of gallons of beer each year.

Hops (Humulus Lupulus, Linn.) are found in most countries of the North Temperate Zone. The English name Hop comes from the Anglo-Saxon hoppan, or (to climb). To the Romans, it was Lupus Salictartius, because of the way the plant grows in nature. As the ancients said, hops grew "wild among willows, like a wolf among sheep," hence the name Humulus Lupulus.

Even though hops have had many uses such as a cure for insomnia to an additive in shampoo, its main purpose today is as a flavoring agent in beer. Hops provide beer with hop flavor, bitterness and aroma along with acting as a preservative through its antibiotic properties. Hops are mentioned by Pliny (61-113 AD), who mentions it as a garden plant among the Romans, who ate the young shoots in spring, in the same way we would asparagus. The hop also has its place in folklore. It has been claimed that animals who eat hops will gain the power of speech on Christmas Eve. This folklore has recently become fact as seen on America Funniest Home Videos.

The use of hops for beer has been documented back to 736 AD in central Europe. In the United States hops were introduced in 1629 by the colonists and have headed west as the country grew and today virtually all commercially grown hops are found in the Pacific Northwest states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

Hops are perennial plants that can be male or female. Male plants are used in breeding and have no use in the brewing of beer, (who sad is that!) The female plant on the other hand produces a hop cone which contains “lupulin” that is used in the brewing process.

There are basically two types of hops. The aroma hops are typified by low alpha acids, higher levels of beta acids, and an oil profile associated with good aroma. These hops would generally be used as a finishing or conditioning hop. Bitter hops have a much higher level of alpha acids than beta acids. These are generally used in the boiling process to extract bitterness.

There are a number of ways to use hops in the brewing process. Whole hops are the natural hop cones that have been dried and baled. It can be argued that this form is the most inconsistent, bulky, poorest storage, and inefficient way to brew of all product forms. Still a number of the world's brewers use the whole hop claiming they prefer the all natural product. Hop pellets are basically whole hops that have been ground through a hammer mill and then pressed together through a pellet die. The ground hops are kept together as a compressed pellet by the hops natural resins.

Yeast is a unicellular fungi that can make our lives hellish or happy. As with any micro organism they may be symbiotic or parasitic. Yeasts can help us make bread, beer, wine and medicine. While others are the causes of diaper rash, thrush of the mouth and throat, and “Yeast infection”, enough said.

The yeasts we seek are the wonderful Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This name is just a category, it is like calling someone a Wisconsinite, but these the type of yeasts that make alcoholic beverages and breads.

The basics; when yeast is added to the “wort” it will begin to take in the sugar and nutrients that we have extracted from the malt and they will utilize that to make more cell material. When enough is taken in, the yeast cell will “bud”, producing another yeast cell which will in turn do the same and so on and so on, alcohol and carbon dioxide are byproduct of this action.

Simple, yes and no, if we are making beer or wine, we must understand the other things that go on during fermentation. Along with producing alcohol and carbon dioxide the yeast creates 75% of the flavor profile of the beer with the production of over 250 different chemical components that add to the flavor profile of the beer.